Here we are February 2010 and the next edition of the Canada Dance Festival is a couple of months away. I’m very excited by what artists are planning for it as I am completing the curation of the June 4 – 12 event. Once again I am confident that the capital region will be animated by much of the most dynamic dance being created in Canada today. There will be something to be experienced for every dance taste – that is for everyone interested in contemporary Canadian dance!
By its very nature, the Canada Dance Festival is most eclectic. It is our goal to offer the public dance that originates in many locales across Canada, dance that is created by dance artists from many communities – culturally diverse communities, aboriginal communities, communities regarded as centres of contemporary dance and communities where the dance artists are forced to work in a more isolated environment. All of the dance will be of a quality that is undeniable and, all of it will reveal a vision where the choreographer has stamped it with their individual context. The dances will be original, provocative, and entertaining. They will be unique expressions of contemporary Canadian culture.
The one unifying concept that will define this year’s celebration is that the dancing will be at the heart of each creation. Every person on earth has felt movement in their body; we know movement, albeit differently and to various degrees but we all know it. Dancing, moving, is a basic human activity that celebrates our aliveness in the here and now, and it is from this point of view that we may even suggest that dance is universal – something we all know. I find this amazingly powerful.
How we move, how we dance is as individual as each of us. In moving, dancing, there is something that triggers a commonality, a kinship, something we recognize. This is how dance communicates – by acknowledging our common awareness of movement. The Canada Dance Festival celebrates dance that has been structured into moving works of artistic expression. Central to each of these expressions is our common awareness of movement – our aliveness at that very moment when we sense even the movement of a heartbeat.
With this short article, I am letting you know the dates of the 2010 Festival, June 4 to 12. I’m encouraging you to mark them in your calendars and I’m inviting you to attend our celebration. From now until the festival event I will write a new article that will inform you of artists who are performing and of the dances they are dancing. Here we are, entering the second decade of what we so recently called the new millennium. Dance is alive. It’s moving. It’s expressing who we are as individuals, as members of various communities and as Canadians. Be ready for our June event, it’s just around the corner.
Brian Webb is the Artistic Director of the Canada Dance Festival. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta and a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. He works to present a diverse body of dances at each festival event and believes that a dance is not complete until an audience witnesses it. Brian became Artistic Director of the Canada Dance Festival in 2001.
